Best of Twitter - Week of May 31, 2021

Julia Galef @juliagalef

Wilbur Wright, on the difficulty of forecasting technological progress -- even for someone at the heart of the field:

Martin Borch Jensen @MartinBJensen

It's a🤯to realize that exercise isn't the default control treatment for #lifespan studies. I often hear 'Is [treatment] better than a healthy diet and #exercise?', but we don't have good answers. It would be cool to include exercise in the NIA Intervention Testing Program.

Aging Science News @AgingBiology

Late-in-life treadmill-training rejuvenates autophagy, protein aggregate clearance, and function in mouse hearts https://t.co/KD9dD6gEJi

Luke Hutchison @LH

@michael_nielsen I was planning to climb with a world-class mountaineer, until I heard that "every serious climber knows that when you climb Everest, you're never quite the same in your head when you come back". outsideonline.com/1884846/are-mo… scientificamerican.com/article/brain-…

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.govEvidence of brain damage after high-altitude climbing by means of magnetic resonance imaging - PubMedWe conclude that there is enough evidence of brain damage after high altitude climbing; the amateur climbers seem to be at higher risk of suffering brain damage than professional climbers.

^ wtf?????????????? “"High-altitude mountaineering kills brain cells—no doubt," says RMI guide Melissa Arnot. "But this is what I do. It's my profession." One internationally known climber confided to me that he isn't sure whether his cognitive function recovers completely after big climbs, or if he just gets accustomed to the diminished capacity. Another, RMI guide Alex Van Steen, once told me, "Sometimes you're never quite right afterwards." “

james wagstaff @jamesmwag

"Make no mistake, this is a train wreck. We’ll be counting the bodies and assessing the damage for years to come." Dementia is a standalone tragedy, the decision to approve a useless drug for Alzheimer's is an awful and totally unnecessary additional cruelty.

Endpoints News @endpts

Bioregnum: Just how sadly misguided is the #FDA on aducanumab? https://t.co/R5z65qFoo2

🦤 @ctbeiser

it'd be interesting to quantify the rate at which unaffiliated reddit users have improved on the state of the art for treatment protocols for diseases. my guess is that for 75% of diseases, they're responsible for a greater QoL increase than pharmaceutical companies over 10 years

🦤 @ctbeiser

I think Reddit has been relatively successful as a scene for crowd knowledge because it's unique among social platforms in having some amount of shared memory: pinned posts, top-rated posts, sidebars, wikis, etc. This seems to allow a much higher ceiling for scene-intelligence.

🦤 @ctbeiser

for example, r/migraines has a wiki, an FAQ, and a comprehensive spreadsheet of treatments for tracking results, as well as threads with good anecdata on most of them. Twitter, in contrast, is a basically oral website: knowledge does not accrete.

Internal Tech Emails @TechEmails

Mark Zuckerberg and CFO David Ebersman debate acquisition strategy February 27, 2012

Ali Abouelatta @abouelatta_ali

Send me a startup advice, I'll send you a counter-example

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